לחם חן — Lechem Chein

For years, I had a sentence I would say about my relationship with Shabbos:  I keep Shabbos. But I don’t necessarily honor Shabbos. That wasn’t always true.  There were years when I didn’t keep Shabbos either. I grew up Chabad, where Shabbos was simply part of the architecture of life. Then came years of drifting away, and eventually years of finding my way back. At some point, Shabbos became non-negotiable again. I kept it. But I was almost always late. If candle lighting in December was at 4:20, I might still be rushing at 4:35. Candle lighting in July at 8:15? Somehow, same thing. Technically, there were a few minutes left until shkiah . Technically, I hadn’t violated Shabbos. Technically, I was keeping it. But that was exactly the problem. It was almost impressive. Give me four more hours to prepare for Shabbos and apparently I could find four more hours of things that needed to get done before Shabbos. My wife hated it. I hated that she hated it. And, if I was being truth...

Got home a little while ago from Mincha. I davened at a Chabad minyan, and afterward the rabbi was giving out lekach for Erev Yom  While walking to my car, a guy from a yeshivish background turned to me. “What was that?” “What do you mean?” “The cake thing.” “Lekach?” Blank stare. He had never seen it before. For anyone else having the same blank stare: lekach is honey cake. There’s an old custom, especially associated with Chassidim and very much part of Chabad, to ask someone — a rebbe, the rabbi, your father, whoever — for a piece before Yom Kippur. They give it to you and wish you a good, sweet year. Part of the symbolism is deliberately putting yourself in the position of asking another person for something and receiving it, while remembering that what we receive ultimately comes from God. There’s also an idea that if there were ever meant to be a moment this year when you’d have to ask another person for sustenance, let this small, sweet, dignified moment be it. And it remind...

I was getting the kids into the car this morning when my son looked at the dashboard and said, “Daddy, it says tire pressure low.” I looked down. Ugh. I got out and found the problem pretty quickly. One tire was almost completely flat, and there, buried in the tread, was a screw. I pulled out the little compressor I keep handy and started filling it back up so I could detour to the tire shop. While waiting for the air to fill, a classic Jewish thought came in:  Zol zein a kapparah. Let this be the kapparah. And then I stopped myself. Wait. I literally did Kapparos last night. I stood there with my kids, swung the chicken, and said: Zeh chalifasi. Zeh temurasi. Zeh kapparasi. This is my exchange. This is my substitute. This is my atonement. So now what? I’m double-delegating?  The chicken already took care of everything yesterday, what’s the tire for? Except then I thought about the few hours that had passed since Kapparos. Apparently, I had already managed to find some new thi...

  Modern Kinnah Tisha B’Av arrives every year with the same stark invitation: Sit on the floor. Mourn. Grieve. Stay with the loss. We hear similar language everywhere today. Therapists tell us to process our emotions. Books advise us to “feel our feelings.” Friends remind us to “give ourselves permission to grieve.” But standard advice rarely explains what that actually looks like. What does “giving yourself permission” look like? Standing in front of a mirror and announcing, “It’s okay. You may grieve now” ? I don’t think most of us struggle to grieve because we lack permission. I think we struggle because we’ve become extraordinarily, expertly good at doing something else. Grieving isn’t creating sadness. It is stopping all the ways we’ve learned to interrupt it. Our First Instinct The moment pain appears—any pain—our mind rushes in to defend itself against the raw impact: We spiritualize it: “Everything Hashem does is for the good.” / “They were a pure soul who finished their m...

We just finished a beautiful Shabbos in New York with family. Everyone had gone to sleep, and I opened my laptop to spend a little time on a project I’d started a few months ago. After writing The Strength to Stop , I had decided what I wanted to do next. Not write another article. Go back.  I wanted to gather the lessons I’d learned over the past year and a half into a book. Not because every blog should become a book—honestly, most shouldn’t. They’re written for a moment, and once that moment passes, so does the writing.  But this feels different. I want these conversations on my shelf, not just on the internet somewhere. I want them next to the sefarim and books I find myself returning to over and over again, because I know I’m not done with them.  There are lessons in these pages that I understand today differently than I did six months ago. Others, I know I’m barely living at all. If I’m going to keep coming back to them, I want to be able to highlight a sentence tha...

Earlier this week I spent an embarrassing amount of time planning our family’s summer vacation. I genuinely enjoy this part. Comparing locations. Reading reviews. Finding the perfect Airbnb or hotel or campsite. Looking at hiking trails. Figuring out whether the four-year-old would enjoy one place more than another, or whether the older boys would get bored. Deciding whether it’s worth spending a little more for a nicer place, a bit more privacy, or a better view. Before long I had more browser tabs open than I could count. The funny part was that every new tab made me less certain, not more.  There were simply too many good options. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I caught myself smiling. This wasn’t really about planning a summer getaway. This was just… me. I’ve noticed the same pattern showing up in lots of places.  It’s rarely the bad ideas that overwhelm me. It’s the good ones. A new book or podcast someone recommends, an article I’d like to write, a program I’d like...

Sunday night I attended a farbrengen in honor of Yud-Beis and Yud-Gimmel Tammuz, celebrating the Frierdiker Rebbe's release from prison. Over the past few years, this group’s farbrengens have gravitated toward a different style. Instead of inviting one or two people to headline the evening—which can feel more like a lecture—someone introduces a theme and then we simply go around the table. Each person has a chance to share whatever that topic stirs in them. Stories. Questions. Struggles. Reflections. Every so often we pause for a niggun, and then someone else picks up the thread. I don't know if that's exactly what farbrengens looked like in the shtetls of old, but I'd like to imagine they felt something like this. Since we were gathering to celebrate the Frierdiker Rebbe's release, I suggested we spend some time exploring a simple question: What does freedom actually mean? After that, though, the floor wasn't mine anymore. That's when the farbrengen really ...

Beha’aloscha was a month ago. At least, that’s when we read it. Apparently it wasn’t finished with me yet. Which, when you think about it, is actually rather fitting. You see, it's the parsha that introduces Pesach Sheni—the second chance that comes exactly one month after the first. Of all the parshiyos to come back to late, this might be the only one where “a month later” isn’t a mistake. It’s built into the Torah itself. When I finished Sefer Vayikra, I made a conscious decision to stop forcing myself to publish something every week . The writing had started as “whenever something felt alive enough to share,” and somewhere along the way it quietly became another obligation. I wanted to return to the original rhythm. Baruch Hashem, that hasn’t meant becoming less engaged. If anything, it’s meant becoming more alive. The processing has continued. Sometimes it becomes an article. Sometimes it becomes a conversation. And sometimes it simply becomes life. So when Beha’aloscha arrived...

Last year, during Parshas Balak, I published a letter to camp staff about connection vs. discipline. It included a postscript—a memory from twenty years ago I’d almost left out entirely—about a staff member who slapped me across the face one night before lights out.  I was fourteen. At the time, I assumed that writing it down had closed the chapter. The story had been told. The lesson had been extracted and shared. Whatever needed to be processed had been processed. Apparently not. Last week, I came across an article that unexpectedly brought the memory rushing back to the surface. The article wasn’t about camp, and it certainly wasn’t about me. But it was written by someone whose last name I associated with that story. As I read it, I found myself thinking about something I’ve been wrestling with a lot over the past year and a half. Much of my recent work has involved revisiting old stories about myself. Stories about who I am. Stories about where I struggle. Stories about things...

This past weekend, I attended an Ahdama Brotherhood retreat. The premise of the weekend was simple, though far from easy: to slow down long enough to remember who you are underneath all the stories, reactions, and patterns you’ve accumulated over the years. Over the last year and a half, I’ve spent a lot of time doing that kind of work—paying attention to the things that trigger me, asking uncomfortable questions, and sitting in the places where I still have room to grow. Most of that work has happened alone or 1 on 1. That’s not a bad thing, as some internal sorting can only be done in isolation, but there was something profoundly different about this weekend. Sitting in that circle, I found myself hearing pieces of my own story in places I didn’t expect. It wasn't because everyone else’s life looked like mine; in many cases, our struggles and histories weren't even close. Yet, I kept recognizing parts of myself. I’d watch a reaction I understood immediately, or a pattern I’d...

This week, I finally had a hard conversation that I had been avoiding for a very long time. It wasn't that the facts of the situation had suddenly changed. What changed was that I finally reached a point where I got more tired of hiding a struggle than I was afraid of being honest about it. I realized it’s healthier to just live in reality than to keep staying on autopilot out of fear of how I'll be seen. And something surprising happened: reality turned out to be much softer than the script fear had written in my head. It didn’t magically solve everything or wipe away the work left to do, but it was human. It was met with warmth and straightforwardness. And it made me think of this week’s parsha, Shelach. When the spies return from the land, they deliver a report that breaks the nation's spirit. But there is one specific line that maps out exactly how fear operates: וַנְּהִי בְעֵינֵינוּ כַּחֲגָבִים וְכֵן הָיִינוּ בְּעֵינֵיהֶם “We were like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and...

I was learning Shaar HaBitachon Wednesday afternoon when someone in the group stopped at a line from the Baal Shem Tov (Fellig Edition p. 119-120). The teaching says that a person should ensure that no day goes by without fulfilling a Torah commandment.  He asked: what’s the chiddush? A person wakes up, says Modeh Ani, washes negel vasser, puts on tefillin. Obviously they’re doing something. My first reaction was: not every Jew does even one mitzva every day. There are lots of non religious people, and the Baal Shem Tov likely wasn’t making statements only for the people in the room with him. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized that wasn’t actually the Baal Shem Tov’s point. What struck me was that the Baal Shem Tov wasn’t describing a deficiency in the mitzvah. He was describing a difference in the person. Two people can do the exact same thing and have completely different experiences of it. One is present. One is on autopilot. The action may be identical, but o...

What Am I Ready to Receive? A Shavuos Reflection on נעשה ונשמע Lately, I’ve been realizing how much of my life I can spend in my head. Thinking through things. Analyzing them. Preparing for them. Running every possible outcome before I take one step forward. What if this happens? What if I’m wrong? What if I don’t understand enough yet? What if I’m not ready? For a long time, that kind of thinking helped me. It helped me survive. It helped me stay ahead of things. It gave me the feeling that if I could just understand enough, prepare enough, and predict enough, I would be safe. But there is a point where thinking stops being clarity and starts becoming a cage.  The mind keeps circling, not because it is finding truth, but because it is afraid to move. Everyone has their own version of this. For some people it is overthinking. For others it is staying busy, staying useful, staying in control, staying numb, or staying one step removed from the thing itself.  Most of us know some...